Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  “There was this mysterious case,” Jack Greenberg said in a interview much later, “[and] a number of us in the office—-Jim Nabrit, Thurgood Marshall, and I—were looking at this thing and wondering what in the world this case was, because we didn’t know anything about it.”

  Marshall went to Bob Carter, who was now technically separate from the LDF and acting as counsel to the NAACP, and asked about the case. As Greenberg recalls, Carter denied knowing about it.25 Several days later, however, as the LDF got hold of the court records, they found that Carter’s name was indeed on the case. “It turned out it was actually his case and he was handling it, and that totally infuriated Marshall,” said Greenberg.26

  Soon thereafter Marshall banned Carter from using the LDF’s offices or law library. Just as he had used concern over the LDF’s tax status to separate himself from Wilkins and the NAACP board, Marshall now cited the IRS problem to totally isolate Carter from the LDF.

  Although he and Marshall were fighting, Carter had done first-rate legal work for the NAACP. While Marshall and the LDF had been preoccupied with the Little Rock case, it was Carter who had taken the lead on protecting NAACP membership lists. Attorneys general from southern states had continued trying to force the organization to release its members’ names. Carter’s defense was extremely popular with the rank-and-file. He won a Supreme Court case in 1958 protecting the association’s right to keep its membership confidential.

  Despite the personal feud and the behind-the-scenes legal dramas, by 1959 Marshall was internationally known as Mr. Civil Rights. And in polls among black Americans, he either beat or tied Martin Luther King, Jr., for the title “Most Important Black Leader.”

  He was also finding comfort with a growing family. Cissy had a second boy, John, in July 1958. Just before John Marshall was born, Thurgood and Cissy found an apartment on the seventeenth floor of a brand-new Harlem development, Morningside Gardens. Among Thurgood’s favorite pastimes was running his toy trains with two-year-old Goody and doting over little John.

  Marshall was on the road far less these days. At age fifty he was also no longer working day and night when he was in New York. Unlike during the turbulent final years with Buster, he was happy to go home. The office had changed too; the staff was bigger and less intimate. Also, success had brought the LDF more money. There was less need for Marshall to be on the phone or out giving speeches to raise a few dollars.

  Once in a while the Marshalls would throw parties, and Thurgood might cook some crab soup or appear wearing an apron and promising a “mystery stew.” Cissy would cook the main course in case Thurgood’s culinary experiments proved unpalatable. “We’d go up there, especially on New Year’s Eve,” remembered Marietta Dochery, a friend and neighbor. “We had a Fourth of July party here, and Thurgood and Cissy had over Alex Haley and Daisy Bates and Lena Horne. People liked to be around Thurgood, he had lots of friends. Cissy would cook her soul food—pigs’ feet, greens, spare ribs, black-eyed peas. Sometimes Thurgood would sing. Maybe he had a couple of drinks or something, and he would sing ‘Happy Am I.’ ”27

  By now Marshall was also becoming more involved in the political life of New York City and Harlem. After his victory in Little Rock, there were regular rumors that he was up for political posts and judgeships. Times had changed since the late 1940s, when black Tammany Hall leaders had blocked the efforts of the Truman administration to put Marshall on the bench. Now his name was put up for a seat on the New York State Board of Regents, which oversaw education in the state. He would have been the first black person to serve on the powerful board, but the Republican-run state legislature killed the appointment.28

  His popularity made even national political office a serious possibility. In 1958 Harlem’s congressman, the flamboyant Adam Clayton Powell, found himself under indictment for tax evasion. Prominent politicians, including Gov. Averell Harriman, pushed Marshall to take the seat. He was also the leading choice of Democratic bosses in Tammany Hall. “Tammany leader Carmine De Sapio was credited by the leaders with proposing Marshall,” wrote the New York Post, which noted that New York’s Liberal Party was also trying to get Marshall to run for Congress.29

  Marshall did not seriously consider going after Powell’s seat, however. He did not want to join hands with Tammany Hall, and he did not have the appetite for raising money and campaigning. Marshall also didn’t want to be labeled as the man who ended Powell’s career. “If Carmine De Sapio or anyone else is putting out a trial horse, they should at least have discussed it with the horse,” he told the New York Post.30

  Congressman Powell responded to Marshall’s decision not to run by inviting him to speak at the next Sunday’s eleven o’clock service at Harlem’s famous Abyssinian Baptist Church, which had been founded by Powell’s father. The church was packed as usual, and from the high, white pulpit, Marshall made a passionate speech that drew Amens from the congregation. When he finished, Powell walked to the pulpit to hug and praise him. “And he came up and made a little talk, saying that I was the greatest this and the greatest that. When Powell spoke, he told the congregation: ‘The one man that I will let succeed me in Congress—the only one—is Thurgood Marshall.’ ” As Marshall and Powell walked out, arm in arm, the lawyer exclaimed: “Adam, what the hell you tell that goddamn lie for?” Powell, pulling his cigar out of his mouth to laugh, said, “Didn’t it sound good!”

  A few weeks later the Amsterdam News wrote that Powell was quitting Congress. A reporter asked him to give names of people he would accept as his replacement. Powell named a dozen people. “My name wasn’t on the list,” remembered Marshall. “He forgot about me five minutes after he said it.” Powell, hungry for the spotlight despite the threat of scandal, eventually changed his mind and won reelection.

  By the late 1950s Marshall had passed on several opportunities to leave the LDF—he had said no to running for Congress and to a federal district court job. His position at the LDF remained secure, and he was more popular than ever. Even so, he knew his time at the NAACP and the LDF was coming to an end. He had a family now and wanted more money; and he wanted the prestige he felt he deserved after his years of sacrifice and many victories for the NAACP. A middle-aged Marshall could also see that the civil rights movement was being transformed. Student sit-ins and mass protests had stirred a storm far outside the courtrooms he dominated. Times were changing for the nation and the question for Thurgood Marshall was whether the times had passed him by.

  CHAPTER 26

  Marshall and the Militants

  IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN TWO DECADES since Thurgood Marshall had arrived in New York, and life on Harlem’s streets had taken on a new color. The jazz, the sparkling late-night clubs, and the loud, funny newcomers from the Old South were being replaced by the angry faces of a new generation. On the street corners in 1959, he could hear spokesmen for the Nation of Islam cursing the white man. In the barbershops there were mouths full of rhetoric, the troubled voices of young blacks frustrated with poor jobs, forced to make a buck in the spreading drug trade if not strung out themselves and contributing to the city’s rising crime rate.

  Despite his shining civil rights credentials, Marshall knew the anger of the streets was also aimed at him as a middle-class lawyer with strong ties to the black elite and the white establishment. On several Saturday nights he had made brief talks between acts at the world-famous Apollo Theater. The place was packed for rock-and-roll shows with young, often more militant black people looking for a good time, full of laughter and drink. If a performer was boring or hit an off note, the Apollo crowd was infamous for loudly booing the offending act off the stage.

  Marshall’s optimistic, flag-waving, up-by-the-bootstraps rhetoric did not always go over well there. Several times the crowd booed, and threatened him by throwing bottles. The trouble at the Apollo followed him home, taking on a more harsh, threatening tone. Some nights, while in his apartment, he could hear Black Muslims denounce him as a “half-white nigger” and a tool of t
he Man, working “hand in glove with the white folks.” Marshall ignored them for the most part, although the police would sometimes send him transcripts of speeches in which especially vicious language was used to attack him by name.

  Listening to the Black Muslims’ intimidating words reminded him of his youthful encounters with Marcus Garvey’s followers. When he had visited Aunt Medi’s apartment in Harlem as a teenager, he had been pushed and shoved, as well as called half-white, by Garveyites who crowded Seventh Avenue for their Back-to-Africa parades. The experience left him with a bitter distaste for black radicals.

  One street-corner voice Marshall easily identified from his apartment belonged to the famed Malcolm X. Now in his mid-thirties, the six-foot-three-inch Black Muslim minister, with reddish brown hair and a goatee, had been born to a poor Baptist preacher in Omaha. Malcolm Little’s father was killed by Klansmen, leading Malcolm to drop out of school and become a small-time hustler—pimping women, selling drugs, and running numbers.

  During a prison stint he got his first exposure to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, a black cult that said white people were the devil’s children sent to oppress black and brown people. Working with black prisoners, the Nation of Islam encouraged education, black unity, and respect for family while condemning the use of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. Black people were viewed as Allah’s chosen. When he left prison in 1952, after a six-year stint, Malcolm X became a minister of the Nation and by the late 1950s was renowned in Harlem for the power of his cutting oratorical attacks on white America. He was equally hard on token blacks working in the white establishment, such as Thurgood Marshall.

  Marshall was aware that Malcolm X regularly lampooned him as a “fool.” The Black Muslims advocated separatism, including having the government give blacks reparations for slavery and a separate state so they could govern themselves. Marshall let most of the Nation of Islam’s barbs and epithets, including Malcolm X’s name-calling, roll off him. But he could not ignore the threats when they were made to his face.

  One evening as Marshall got off the subway, two men wearing bow ties, pressed white shirts, and long black coats approached him. When he tried to walk past them, they blocked his way. “Excuse me,” Marshall said. The men, glaring at him, replied: “Excuse me, you half-white son of a bitch. We ought to kick your ass.”

  Marshall was tensed for trouble when a police car screeched to the curb and two white policemen got out. They had apparently been keeping an eye on the Black Muslims. One policeman asked the lawyer if he was having any trouble. “Not now,” said Marshall. With the two white detectives now shoulder to shoulder with the Black Muslims, Marshall quickly walked away.

  Under pressure from the Black Muslims, including several other occasions where they jostled him in the street, Marshall found himself developing a closer relationship with New York’s police department and its commissioner, Stephen Kennedy. The two met when Kennedy sought Marshall’s advice on how to handle racial flare-ups between the mostly white police department and the city’s growing black population. Marshall, who took great pride in having done NAACP investigations into race riots in big northern cities such as Detroit, was pleased that the New York police commissioner would acknowledge his expertise.

  Kennedy particularly needed Marshall on the night of July 15, 1959, after rumors spread that a white cop had brutally beaten a black woman. Malcolm X led a march of Black Muslims, who loudly condemned the police and talked up the beating. As it got late more and more bottles were thrown at police cars by crowds hanging out on hot, summertime streets. Commissioner Kennedy got the baseball players Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays to urge people to calm down, go home, and wait until all the facts were out.

  Then Kennedy called Marshall and asked him to go to the hospital and interview the cop and the woman. “Number one, she wasn’t black,” Marshall later recalled. “She was a Puerto Rican, spoke practically no English, and was drunk as anybody you’d ever run across.”1 Shaking his head, Marshall later added, “Then we went up to Harlem Hospital to see Police Officer Gleason. He was white. He kept on telling us what she had done. Both of his legs, when he took the bandage off, there was no skin. She’d kicked all of it off his shins. I said, ‘I think the police are right.’ She should be arrested. Incidentally, they didn’t hit the woman, she didn’t have no bruises on her.… I sided with the policemen.”

  Marshall was quoted in the newspapers as supporting the police and endorsing Commissioner Kennedy’s decision to send extra officers into black neighborhoods on the night of the incident. Several NAACP members openly questioned his embrace of the police. Nonetheless, Marshall stood by the law enforcement officials, claiming “they are crucifying that man [Commissioner Kennedy].”2 The Black Muslims were outraged.

  The next night Commissioner Kennedy showed up at Marshall’s apartment with a small package. When he handed it to Marshall, the lawyer asked, “What’s this?” Kennedy smiled while Marshall unwrapped it and found a snub-nosed gun, complete with a permit. Cissy had been watching and immediately grabbed the gun from her husband. “Uhn-uhn, don’t put your damn hands on it,” she said, worried about the possibility of the boys handling the weapon. Kennedy reluctantly took the gun back, but he put an officer outside Marshall’s apartment to keep an eye on him as he went around town.

  Despite the criticism and threats he received from the Nation of Islam, Marshall did not back down. In October he made a speech at Princeton University in which he labeled the Nation a “bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails.” Elijah Muhammad responded in a newspaper column titled: “Muhammud [sic] Hits Thurgood Marshall.”

  “The Negro leadership is in love with the Negroes’ enemies,” Muhammad began. “One would think that Mr. Marshall would be in sympathy with freedom, justice and equality for the so-called Negroes.… But the weight of his … false charges made indirectly against me and my followers proved otherwise.… We have not been opposed to the NAACP’s cause,” Muhammad continued, “only we feel … that they should not at this late date seek integration of the Negroes and the Whites, but rather separation.… Seeking closer relationship between the slaves and their masters only will provide total destruction of the Negroes by the wise, old slavemaster’s children.… Thurgood Marshall does not care for the recognition of his kind or for the Black Nation. He is in love with the white race. He hates the preaching of the uplifting of the Black Nation unless it is approved by the white race.”3

  Muhammad’s criticism, like Malcolm X’s street-corner jeremiad, had little impact on Marshall, who viewed Muhammad’s appeal for a separate black nation as lunacy. “I don’t know of any better way to sink the ship than that way,” Marshall said, scowling, when asked about the Black Muslim ideology. Muhammad’s ideas were a thorough repudiation of what Marshall stood for in arguing that the Constitution protected American citizens equally, without regard to race. And Muhammad’s talk of Black Nationalism was the exact opposite of Marshall’s lifelong advocacy of racial integration that required whites to accept blacks as equals.

  While Muhammad and his followers continued to attack him in their speeches, an unbowed Marshall was drawing even closer to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover had been keeping tabs on Malcolm X and the Nation for several years and was aware that Marshall was the target of Black Muslim fury. The bureau was also a target of criticism from Malcolm X and the Nation for its failure to go after the KKK and other white racists. In fact, the Black Muslim critique was very similar to the criticism that had come from Marshall and the NAACP more than ten years earlier, specifically that the FBI was cozy with white hate groups that violated the rights of black people.

  In March 1959, Hoover had authorized an FBI visit to Malcolm’s mosque in New York. The agent reported that during a speech, Malcolm asked if there were any policemen in the room. When one stood, Malcolm said he wished more law enforcement agents would visit the mosque. The FBI agent later reported, “Malcolm also stated that the officer should
report that they [members of the Nation] are law-abiding people [but] they do not teach their people to love ‘white folks.’ Malcolm further stated: ‘Man, you should arrest them [whites]. We were kidnapped. We were not brought here on the Queen Mary or the Mayflower.’ ”4

  Hoover and Marshall now had a common enemy. Although Marshall had cooperated previously with the bureau, he was now totally free to work with Hoover. With funding from large foundations, he no longer needed the NAACP’s money. And since his takeover of the LDF, he didn’t have to respond to Roy Wilkins and the NAACP branches.

  While the FBI continued to monitor Malcolm X’s speeches and travels closely, blacks in the South continued to complain about the FBI’s failure to investigate race crimes. When a New York Post reporter telephoned Marshall for a story on FBI misconduct, the lawyer got angry and immediately contacted the bureau. He spoke with one of Hoover’s top aides. According to an FBI memo on the telephone call: “[Marshall] wanted the Director to know that he planned to tell the reporter to either ‘put up or shut up’ and he would demand to know specific cases and not generalities if they wanted his opinion on things. He stated he had learned this from the Director many years ago and he thought this was the best way to handle the New York Post. ”5

  Marshall did not want Hoover to think that he was feeding information to the reporter. He was acting to prevent a repeat of the events that had led to Hoover’s charge years before that the NAACP and Marshall were making unfounded complaints about racist FBI activity.

  After Marshall did the interview with the Post, he called the FBI again, this time speaking with the New York office. In a 1959 memo titled “Smear Campaign,” an agent wrote that Marshall said the reporter wanted his opinion of the FBI’s record in the South. Marshall said he was “satisfied” with the FBI’s investigations.